Re: Kuttner, Enron and the Chicago Ideology

[Bruce McFarling <ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2002 15:14:48 -0500, Charles Pouncy
<cpouncy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>>It is important to note that we do not live in a Democracy.  Our form of
>>Government is a Republic.

>How do you distinguish a democracy from a republic?

That's easy.  In a representative democracy, governing elites
are chosen in elections rather than by other means, such as
shooting contests between rival army units.

While a (modern) republic is a state in which the claim to
legitimacy as government is consent of the governed.

So they are distinguished as orthogonal dimensions, like
North-South versus East-West.

Specifically, you can be a democratic monarchy (perhaps
because it pleases the monarch not to provoke people into
declaring a republic, taking away his or her perks), a
democratic people's republic, in which the consent of the
governed requires a substantial bit of training and work
to elicit and false consciousness sometimes makes people
THINK they aren't consenting when it is historically inevitable
that they are, and authoritarian fascist regime (a most
logically consistent combination in which legitimacy and
power both come from the barrel of a gun) or a democratic
republic.

Thus, democracy is about RULES of behavior, while
republicanism is about legitimacy and hence about FOLKVIEWS
or internal explanations of behaviour.

Though my best guess was that the original message was not
thinking of a Schumpeterian or institutionalist definition
of democracy, but was thinking of an idealised definition
instead.

** In an ideal world, idealists wouldn't keep
confusing folkviews and rules, but pragmatically
there's little you can do to stop them. **


Virtually,

Bruce McFarling, New Lambton, NSW
ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx